Orville

The Doing of It. This is only a part of the story of an elderly man, my original boat shop landlord who became my friend, mentor and part of my life. ​​The boat shop guys, 1985. Orville is seated with the hat. I am the guy with the beard. Art is behind me and Jeff is beside him. In the middle is a half scale 16' drift boat.Charleton and I talked about driftboats during breaks from the work we did painting houses. The quick listener would hear our words; but also the formation of our dreams running out ahead of those words. We mulled our plan. We decided to reconnoiter. We went out to Don Hill’s boat shop, the next logical step. We had earlier seen some of his boats at a local Sportsmen’s show, and their beauty kidnapped our emotions.

The intricacy of connections, various woods coming together under the coats of varnish felt like visions of magic…like expressions beyond the purposes of utility, but of art. The joinery was mysterious. Beguiling. Later, we would know that these complex joints were sort of like a successful scientific experiment; repeatable. Like any other profession, some things that present themselves at first blush as complex, are actually rather perfunctory. Not to rob the magic from all that wooden joinery but it was easier to do than it looked. The work will always grab me, it’s just that now I know the recipe. I am merely seeking other recipes now, moving on to experience the next thing. Just like Mister Headlee did.Industrial Espionage.Part of our mission to Don Hill’s boat shop was a silly attempt at “industrial espionage.” Again, later, when I had my own shop, I hosted many folks performing their own brand of “industrial espionage.” I realized they would have as much of a challenge analyzing the data as Charleton and I did. I don’t recall a thing worth remembering from Don Hill’s shop that would help me later on. Clearly, any recipe would need the knowledge of all the ingredients, in the right proportions, to make headway into the magic we sought.

A few years later, after Charleton and his wife Pinky left Eugene, Oregon for Pass Christian, Mississippi for good, I went back to Don’s shop and bought a couple of sets of his boat plans. My work painting houses had become dreadfully slow, so I had the notion of making some money building a boat or two and then selling them. Don didn’t seem to care one way or another. Rightly so…I was no competition at the time.

Don was legendary in his day. Don, I learned later, went many steps too far and too fast, expanding his business beyond his ability to fund or manage it. When it kept failing, he kept trying to re-boot the thing, perhaps failing to learn the skills needed to keep from yet another nose dive. Making the same mistakes expecting different results.After building a single boat from his plans, he hired me to run his shop. Shortly, I became owner of all the means of production. I built the boats. He was responsible for sales. Our business relationship lasted about six months. I mention all this, because I eventually rented my shop from Orville, who had formerly rented the same buildings to Don. Orville and I began then to weave a tangled web of life. This was the genesis of the story of Orville and me. The very beginning. Orville was 76 when we first got to know each other. He died at 93. During those years, I realized that he and I were not so different. We lived our lives in many chapters, spending our interests in living out life on our own terms. Doing each thing. Just for the joy of the doing of it.It should be clear to all that we all succumb to our mortality. We all die. A Native American friend of mine described his young son’s untimely death in this way; “Walking on.” As you’ll see, Orville died in the way he wanted, perhaps best described as “walking on,” in a similar way as he lived. It was just another stage. Walking on.

It feels a bit odd to place Orville’s decline and death near the beginning of a memoir. Usually one begins at the beginning. But it continues to dawn on me that his death was just another iteration of his way of doing things, each thing done just for its own sake. For me, his death process over those final months of his life instructs me how to attack the prospect of the frictions of life from one end to the other. He modeled my own practice, the one he exemplified; the doing something for the joy of the experience. I did my grieving his death for the joy of it, the rawness of it, the experience of it. I still grieve the memory of him, Orville S. Headlee. It is the kind of experience that hurts, but nonetheless teaches, it is the kind of experience that moves me on. Teaches me about him, and teaches me about myself.

His dying was hard for me. I didn’t realize then how long a process dying was. I didn’t allow myself the realization that he had been wading into it for years. He fought old age by denying its eventual arrival by doing the many things that brought him joy. Nonetheless the process didn’t always work.He began to have panic attacks, for example, years before he finally walked on, never returning. The ambulances would come for him. His wife Marie couldn’t hear very well and could barely see by that time, so I took on the duty of collecting the names of his medications for the trip to the hospital. I followed the ambulance in my car to the emergency room, waiting there until the anti-anxiety medicine took effect, then took him home. He also had seizures, several times early on. The seizures were terrifying to watch. Each time it happened, it would chip off another chunk of his resiliency.

On the day when Judy and I returned from our second date, a day on the McKenzie River, we stopped by so she could meet Orville. Orville’s first career was nursing, a rare occupation for a male in the early part of the 20thcentury. Judy was the Chief Nurse for the area hospital system. I figured they might have something to chat about.They did.As Judy and I, Orville and Marie talked in his living room, Orville began to have one of his panic attacks. Once again, the fire drill of meds, following the ambulance to the emergency room. Judy worked as chief nurse for the county’s largest hospital. Thee three of us were on the way to the competition’s hospital across town. Time moves very slowly in the ER, especially with the patient is on anti-anxiety meds, so Orville took the advantage of the slowness of time to give Judy the complete ‘third degree’ about nursing, and about me, while I sat alone in the waiting room. Judy, a nurse, had (former registered nurse) Orville’s attention. I sat in the waiting room.

​Orville refused to allow me join the two of them. I wasn’t really insulted. I was glad for Orville’s attention to the woman I would ultimately marry. So I cooled my heels reading ads and articles in Good Housekeeping magazines, while Orville exercised control. An ever aging man, he compensated for his age related infirmities by exercising greater control over the things he still could. As I age, I see that quality in myself. Orville feared death. That was the foundation of his frequent attacks of anxiety. Marie’s death brought it even closer to home.Once Marie died, months before his own departure, daily life just became too hard for him in every way. His congestive heart failure robbed his energy, defying his spirit’s race to endure. I realized the race was being lost one afternoon when Orville was almost too weak to blow his emergency whistle…normally my summoning call. This day it was barely audible. It took a while for me to notice it. It was very weak sound, like a slight audible of wind through a tree. He now had little air in his lungs to power it, in order to rustle up enough noise for me to hear it.

My friends Mike, Gary and I were standing in the parking lot of the shop telling fishing and hunting stories to ourselves (all lies) when it finally dawned on me that weak sound was Orville’s alarm system. His old pool whistle hung on a lanyard around his neck. Unknown to us, he had fallen just 50 feet away, next to the compost bin. He couldn’t yell. There wasn’t enough air. He could only whistle very weakly, especially after trying for several minutes. He had watched us while we laughed at each other’s stories, oblivious of his distress as he languished on the ground. I was mortified when I turned to the noise, saw him partially sprawled out, unable to rise, laying next to the compost bin. We helped him up. From that day, his dignity left him. It remained imprinted on the ground behind him, as if part of the compost.

During his recent doctor’s appointments, I had already begun helping him undress and dress. A new thing for me especially; but really for both of us, despite the experience of his former nursing career. It was a level of intimacy I was completely unprepared to perform, yet did, as one human for another. I guess if the Pope (I later learned) can wash the feet of convicts, I could at least help my friend deal with his clothing.

At the time, my denial was still alive. I wanted him to always remain alive. If I was honest, I would probably admit while he was still alive, a generation or more ahead of me, I wouldn’t be near the front of the line for the grim reaper; “Next!”

Late in the game, after a dentist appointment, I offered to take him on a longer route back to the house, along the McKenzie. I thought he would enjoy the ride, along with the view he had experienced throughout most of his life. He didn’t. He was spent. He said, “I am just too damned tired. I’d like to go home.” Everything within me wanted to rewind, to be given the Orville I had known back into my life. Only later did I realize that he was still in my life, and would be, even on these pages…still with me in the decades since he was gone from this life.His body and spirit gave up. He just lacked the will to live any longer. One day he walked on. Hospice was there, as was his son.His son was an attorney and an engineer who lived in California. A was frugal man with both his time and his money. I guess lawyers are trained that time IS money. I remember Orville’s neighbor telling me the fellow’s method of travel to get to his father’s place outside Springfield. According to the neighbor, he rode the Greyhound from Sacramento, then the Springfield city bus to its nearest stop from the house. He reflected on spectacle of the man, dressed up, in a professional overcoat “picking them up and putting them down” along Jasper road, walking the last mile from the bus stop, carrying a small suitcase in one hand and a briefcase in the other. Sleeping in his parent’s now empty house. Wasting no time taking care of the estate. That’s what it ultimately amounted to. Just an estate. Legal work.A Passion for DirtThe old man’s passion was his dirt. His field. When I first arrived to rent his buildings for my new boat shop, the soil was sour. You could smell its sourness, especially when Orville ran his disc through it. The disc would turn the soil into sticky slabs. It would just lie there, stinking for days. The wind would pick up the smell blowing across the sticky mess, sending it into the boat shop.

What had happened was that years earlier he had dumped some sawdust on the field to fill it in a little, and to introduce some bio-mass. It was a mistake. It ruined the soil. Perhaps he felt guilty about it, because each new season for 15 years he planted soil-building crops. It became his constant passion. Barley. Oats. Fava beans. Clover. Alfalfa. It was never for money. The yield was never sold. Often, a few rows of corn were planted, to the delight of those fortunate enough to be given a bag or two. And each year as long as they were able, they planted enough tomato plants, they could can a year’s supply of tomatoes from a single day’s harvest. The rest was sold in a little stand along the road in front of the house.

Canning, though I never did it myself, nonetheless hits a primordial nerve. My own Great Grandmother (on my mother’s side) was once Idaho Mother of the Year, but she said she couldn’t attend the ceremony because she “had to do her canning.” How easily the rest of us forgot the power of our roots. Happily, her family and neighbors of nearby farms pitched in enough expertise to ‘put up’ her vegetables and fruit for the household. Great Grandma got her award.

The Headlee place took up three and a half acres at the corner of Jasper Road and Clearwater Lane, just outside the city limit of Springfield, Oregon. Orville had the house built after he arrived with his wife and children in 1948. It was situated on the northern edge of the place, facing Jasper Road. In 1984, the Olympic Torch would pass by the house along Jasper on the way to the Los Angeles Games.

Fruit trees and the main garden lay in the full distance along the Eastern property line. Orville’s garden was near our boat shop. The garden was their lives. They took their gardening very seriously. As seriously as I did my boats.The day I first brought Fritz, my tiny German Shorthair puppy to the shop, Orville liked him, but warned, “That dog better not pee on my lettuce. If I catch him, I’ll shoot him.” Early one morning, he found a deer browsing his lettuce. He loaded up his shotgun and shot it with a shell full of ‘buck shot.’ It failed to drop dead in the garden where it was supposed to. It eventually expired in the neighbor’s yard across Jasper, much to Orville’s anxiety. After that he was always afraid someday the game warden would show up at his door and he would go to jail for shooting that deer. Out of season. Yet no one found out. I heard Wally Lewis took care of it, but I couldn’t swear to it. In any case, I respected Orville and Marie’s garden that much more after the deer incident. From then on, I kept an eye on Fritz and his little pink pencil never watered any of Orville’s salad. The building between the shop and the house was the “potting shed”. It was huge and full of decades of agricultural stuff. After Orville died, it was an important collection of his DNA, a full array of final witnesses to Orville’s life, now orphaned. A master gardener, Orville and Marie used this structure ostensibly for bulbs and seedlings, yet this building also contained 50 years of tools for all sorts of jobs; as much a soiled code of a man’s life as any miracle of modern science. Permutations of hammers, screwdrivers, empty buckets, and bags of various fertilizers filled the building.

My Grandfather McKague always said that his most useful tool on the farm was a good shovel. Those garden tools of every variety had abounded in Orville’s palette. Each leathery wooden handle reflected the hands that guided all those years of use. Each worn wood handle, each tool, knew stories of hands that could no longer be told. Gone.When it became time for the estate sale, seeing those tools disappear felt like the dispersal of Orville’s story. Many came to the diaspora. The women would usually go to the house, seeking to haul away Orville and Marie’s household that had sustained them for so long. The men would head for the potting shed. The pieces of Orville’s life there dribbled away to other sheds with other stories. All that stuff around the work benches Orville had made himself. The contents of his wooden bench drawers gradually gave up the physical remnants of who he was, the man whose sign out front said “O. S. Headlee.”

Further South, from the potting shed to the southern end of the property, stood The three buildings which comprised my rented boat shop…the main shop, the boat shed and a storage area. That storage became the beginning of my own flotsam and jetsam of life. My emerging story.

After retiring from nursing, the Headlee’s had run an egg ranch. Retiring once more for good, the chicken buildings were made fit for building boats. In my days there I never forgot our shop was a former chicken shed. To the west of the house and the boat shop, along Clearwater Lane, lay about an acre of flat land. The “Field.” When I arrived in 1982, half the “Field” hosted Filbert trees (“Hazelnut”, for the un-tutored). It lasted only a few years after I got there. It eventually got thrown into the same circumstance as the “Field” and its rank smell. The trees were purged of their simple sin of existing. Orville was getting old and could no longer do the work required to keep the orchard maintained and producing. The price of Filberts fell to the point that only the very largest of orchards could make any money. One morning he got up and decided it was a good day for his filbert orchard to die. He had most of the trees lying on the ground that very day.

It was a massacre. The bodies laid akimbo. The root wads, trunks and limbs were cleaned up within a week. Orville said “he needed something to do,” so he cut the orchard down. “Hasn’t made money for years anyway”. I think its destruction was a guilt offering to God for the sin of the stinky field. The upshot? “The Field “ doubled in size.The elimination of the orchard saved some work, but added some. Orville would now tend to twice the size of field, still at no obvious purpose to those who knew him. Occasionally someone would pull up to the side of the road at the edge of it, asking to rent a portion of the field. Sometimes they’d want the whole thing. One person would want to fence it for grazing their horses, another would want to grow vegetables or spices on it. They offered good money. It didn’t matter to Orville. He wanted sole possession. Control. Perhaps Orville felt his penance was never complete for creating the stinky field. Maybe in his soul he felt he needed to continue on, plowing and planting, plowing and planting. Year in, year out; Orville riding his 1956 red Massey-Ferguson tractor, plowing and planting……

As I look back, I remember gradually the soil of “The Field” got better. It became sweeter and looser. The disc would make no more wet sticky slabs. The dirt would crumble nicely. I am sure that pleased him, even though he knew the city’s edge was creeping closer to his charge. He must have known that someday houses would be built on it, and all his work plowing and planting would be for naught, a race never won. Yet again, reflecting back, I understand why he continued on, year after year. I realize I would do the same.He did it just for the doing of it. His full name was Orville S. Headlee. I lettered the sign in front of the house, the one reading “O. S. Headlee.” He was six foot two or so, about as tall as I am. He was very slender and upright in posture. He might strike one as a “period piece” New Englander. Most of his day was spent in bib overalls and a hat. He was light skinned and balding. He had troubles with the sun, which caused lesions on his scalp. Our mutual dermatologist and friend, Dr. Olson froze them with liquid nitrogen.

Like most men of his generation, he wouldn’t go anywhere without his hat. During the working day he wore a grayish-blue plastic pith helmet. I managed to rescue that plastic pith helmet at his estate sale for my own head, for those times I rode my own lawn tractor. I suppose someday someone will trot it off with it, mingling it with their story…or perhaps it will go to Goodwill.

I am sure Orville is giggling at me, up there in tractor heaven…me riding around in my puny little mower, trying to be like him, indifferent to the world, wearing that old plastic pith helmet. I hope he takes it as a compliment, as I try to emulate his intimate stewardship of the land. After all, the land is where gravity stops us, at one time or another.

When I first met him, he seemed gruff. I soon came to know he suffered no fools. Part of the reason was his age, I think. I am sure he felt he had long earned the right to be blunt. And so he was. Almost daily, he would step into the shop, halting our work. He would utter one word; “Well?” This became his cryptic command to know all. Our command to tell all…the developments of the day, family news, and gossip. As per the ritual, I would fill him in, in considerable detail. He’d grin, showing stubs of enamel; gold edging his rows of teeth, proud he could prod a summary report from us with one simple word.He wore funny, dated plastic rimmed glasses. He replaced them once with a pair of stylish wire-rimmed ones. That small touch transformed him into a very handsome man. He didn’t like them. He soon got rid of them, as he said they hurt his nose. I think he simply felt awkward being stylish. I regret telling him so. I think I violated his independence by complimenting him. Funny how that works.

Many evenings, on my way out of the drive, I would pass the old man sitting on the bouncing tractor, just ahead of a cloud of dirt. Plowing, disking or seeding. Who knows what. To make a fuss, I’d always honk and wave goodbye for the day. My noisy fuss was only for fun. To give him a poke. All I would ever get back from him was a slowly raised, canvas glove filled with his wrinkled old hand, lifted always to the front, never in my direction. I could never alter the beat of his life when he was working his earth. His head would never turn towards me. I would chuckle to myself at my bit of fun with him, and be on my way. It was our little thing, his transparent dryness, putting my youth in its place. ​